BrawlQuest

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Description

BrawlQuest is an MMORPG centred on brawling and questing in a 2d environment.

Tech Stack

Go, Lua, Love2D

My Role

This was a solo project for most of its lifetime sparked by a love of atmosphere in games like World of Warcraft and the "chatroom" feel of Club Penguin, two games that I played extensively as a child and pre-teen.

Whilst at University I built the game out to a full scale 2d MMORPG, then scrapped it literally weeks before release over fears it wouldn't be good enough. In fairness, it probably wouldn't have been.

In 2021 I received funding to work on the game full-time alongside of my FreshPlay employees Dan, and we both spent 6 months building up to an early access release. I handled the server - rewritten in Go - and central game mechanics and business logic while Dan focused on the UI, along with frontend effects.
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We released it in 2022. Unfortunately, it didn't sell particularly well and issues stemming from the lack of a NA server prevented it from growing as we needed it to.

The game is still available, but development has ceased. You can watch a video breakdown of the game's development here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3O0EmvyrDA

Take-aways

  • I love game development and if it was economically feasible I'd spend the rest of my life developing fun little games and growing communities
  • Game development is not economically feasible if your focus is on developing fun little games and growing communities rather than marketing, marketing, monetisation and marketing
  • Love2D is very fun for making small projects but a nightmare when you hit 20k+ lines of code
  • Go is amazing!!!!